Time Gentlemen, Please!, Brillo Indie Point-and-Click

I love point-and-click adventures as much as the next person. Actually, that hoary old platitude is an outright lie, in this case; I love them a great deal more than the next person, assuming of course that I am not standing next to Ron Gilbert.

Anyway, it’s a great time to be me, or someone like me, or like Ron Gilbert, because there are quite a few excellent point-and-clicks from a variety of different creators. There’s Telltale’s new episodic Monkey Island games that kicked off earlier this week. There’s the remake of the original Monkey Island on Xbox Live next week. LucasArts has also re-released several classic games on Steam.

But I haven’t actually played any of those yet. What I’ve been sinking my capacity for item-based puzzle solving into is a pair of adventures called Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! Created by a small indie team, these two games are professional, polished productions all the way through. While the free-of-charge first game does have some rough edges and is not especially complex or lengthy, the $5 sequel is every bit as detailed, internally consistent, funny, and engaging as the best output of classic-era Lucas or Sierra.

Andrew Vestal’s raves about the game, specifically its profane, unapologetically British, pitch-perfect comedy writing, got me into the series. Although you don’t have to play Ben There, Dan That before Time Gentlemen, I’d recommend it — the first game is free, and though not quite as awesome as the second, it’s still well worth playing through.

But Time Gentlemen, Please is the indie masterpiece, a point-and-click that loves the genre it’s in. The writers do poke fun at the conventions of the genre from time to time, and occasionally make casual reference to the classic games that inspired them, but it’s not a complete and total shattering of the fourth wall. The puzzles are mostly fair — there were a couple things that I’d have changed about Ben There, but Time Gentlemen has a better hint system in case you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing.

And there are some puzzles, particularly the ones that use mini-games that play off of text adventures and text-based point-and-click game mechanics, that really impressed me. These games aren’t just a casual “hey, let’s make a point-and-click like Lucas used to” diversion for these designers — they truly understand how to exploit the genre’s strengths.